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Joanna Lumley: Never mess with an old Avenger

The star has left politicians including the prime minister reeling in her wake as she ﬁghts for the Gurkhas' rights. Her popularity with the public matches her passion for good causes. No wonder there are calls for a damehood

There is a video on YouTube of the 1976 version of Joanna Lumley, cigarette in hand, being interviewed by Russell Harty. In a flared floating trouser suit she leaps laughing out of her chair to show how she learnt to walk at modelling school, her gleaming blonde bob the epitome of 70s glamour.

Scroll on a few decades and there she is on Graham Norton's chat show in 2007, being horrified at the smoking ban, and obligingly showing how she learnt to get in and out of an E-type Jaguar at modelling school without flashing her pants.

Self-deprecating, beautiful, funny, posh as only a privately educated child of the Raj can be, Lumley has actually given away very little over the years and certainly never revealed her underwear – except for a brief outing in stockings and suspenders for Comic Relief. And her voice is so loved that computer company AOL has long-used it as their log-on welcome to their customers.

That kind of effortless charm has served the 63-year-old actress well over the past week in her trickiest appearance to date, bang in the critics' sights in the role of celebrity with a cause.

Fronting the Gurkhas' campaign to be allowed residency in the UK, she first turned up at Parliament's gates in tears, then went off for tea and sympathy with the prime minister, emerging to declare him a "man of integrity" who would help the soldiers' cause. Next came the Home Office blunder that cracked Gordon Brown's window of benevolence, letters were sent to several Gurkhas undermining the PM's promise.

Back came Lumley to the television studios, and bumped straight into the luckless immigration minister Phil ­Woolas. Some commentators have suggested that what followed was a travesty of democracy, but would any of them been able to resist the elegant Joanna Lumley? Woolas certainly couldn't. Leaving their brief meeting he was a step behind her, both in mind and in body, looking dishevelled and his tie askew, having felt the heat from that unwavering blue-steel gaze, and told assembled journalists that Ms Lumley would, of course, be appeased.

It was fabulous because Lumley is fabulous, and the effect she has on men is part of the fun. This grandmother-of-two is old enough to be the mother of many of the journalists and MPs currently nodding off to sleep these nights with sweet thoughts of the week when they were merely in the vicinity of fragrant Joanna.

The government and the opposition figures who feted Lumley last week have been accused of bowing to the power of celebrity, but surely beauty played its part too. Would David Cameron have made that unseemly dive into a photo opportunity with any other campaigner, looking for all the world like an over-enthusiastic bridesmaid desperate to catch the bouquet? Beauty has pushed Lumley's case, however clever she is with it. For a mature woman, charm is just sweet without beauty – the war cry might have seemed shrill, the passion possibly patronised.

However, Lumley bucks the trend as far as campaigning actresses go because she has never been a limelight-hogger. When her only child, James, was born, Lumley was a 21-year-old unmarried mother. She refused to name the father. "I have never felt the constraints of social acceptability," she has said, but friends have hinted at how tough things must have been under that kind of pressure, both personally and in career terms. Years later it emerged her lover had been Michael Claydon, an Anglo-Indian photographer, a career that their son, Jamie, has followed.

Her first marriage, to comedy writer Jeremy Lloyd, lasted less than a year and was equally shrouded in mystery. "We met and married within two-and-a-half weeks. I rest my case. I mean, it's as mad as a box of frogs," is all she has said.

When she married her second and lasting husband, conductor Stephen Barlow in 1986 after a "torturously long courtship", it was in a tiny registry office in Fort William where a kindly official had disguised their names on the list and the press only caught up with them when the reception was in full swing, a memory which still gives her great delight.

Lumley somehow seems to have always been famous, and even though Absolutely Fabulous was billed as her "comeback" in 1992 she had rarely strayed far from acting since appearing as the "English girl" in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the 1969 Bond film, and then going straight into a stint in Coronation Street. The part as Purdey in The New Avengers furthered her British tea-time TV fame and her bowl haircut was as copied by 70s women as the "Rachel cut", sported by Jennifer Aniston in Friends, was in the 90s.

Jennifer Saunders had never met Lumley when she sent her the script for the part of Patsy Stone – the gloriously drunk, chain-smoking shallow fashionista – in Absolutely Fabulous. And Lumley, famous for rarely looking at the scripts she is sent, has said simply of this one: "It made me laugh. And I got the chance not to be the completely good character for once."

But for the car lover who adores Top Gear and made the ultimate sacrifice in handing over her £20,000 sports car to an animal charity when its funding had hit a critical low, it is her campaigning work that she lives for. "You have to feel more involved than just writing out a cheque. Charity is almost the wrong word – I think people are beginning to feel more responsible for the world," she said.

Will Travers, executive director of the Born Free Foundation and son of its founder actress Virginia McKenna, is a friend. "Right back at the beginning, in the early 80s, she had got hold of my mother's number and rang one morning to say she had seen something on our campaign against zoo animals and wanted to help. ITN had rung and asked us to go on that day's lunchtime news and Jo said 'I'll go' and that was it. She was there presenting an articulate and well-informed case. She really is always there at the drop of a hat for us.

"There's no decorative approach, she's very hands on and was out in Kenya helping with a giraffe project in the wild with us. I have been listening to people over the past few weeks making snarky comments about the cult of celebrity and gratuitous support for good causes but I'm convinced Jo is in it for the long haul because she genuinely believes in the issues with a principled passion. She invests 110% or she invests nothing at all. As an actress of huge talent she can tune in to the clarity of language and in a world full of obfuscation, smoke and mirrors, she tells it straight. She mustn't and doesn't take herself too seriously and I think respect for her is cross-generational," he says.

"But I don't like the idea of her being a national treasure, that's a little too fusty and crusty for Jo. By all means though do roll on the damehood."

It is a story reflected by all her worthy causes – she rings them and all of a sudden she is there, right up to the hilt.

"She has been a real champion," says Matt Whitticase, spokesman for the Free Tibet campaign. "She has a strong personal connection to Tibet through her grandfather and grandmother who were some of the first westerners ever to go there. Her concern is entirely natural, not at all contrived and she has even opened her own house occasionally to host former political ­prisoners, and her bond with those people is extraordinary to see.

"There's that rather Princess Diana thing there, that ability to dissolve all boundaries with people. Really, no praise is high enough."

Sainthood may be rather further away than a damehood for Lumley, but the "common touch" of engaging with anyone on her radar is an ingrained characteristic, whether hosting Tibetan prisoners of conscience in her home or buying cigarettes for a homeless man in her local newsagent on the condition he stops being rude to passers-by.

In 2007 a journalist went to Sheffield to interview Lumley, who was appearing there in a Jonathan Miller production of The Cherry Orchard. After the show the pair adjourned to a pub – where Lumley drank gin and tonic – but when the journalist returned from the bar she found her interviewee at a different table chatting calmly to an unstable-looking man with a gun. Lumley told police later that she had seen the gun fall from his bag so popped over to ask "why he had a firearm and whether he was going to use it to cause harm". She kept the man chatting while police were called.

As for her work, she has said that she is as "about as ambitious as a dish of water", but still she has worked consistently in television, theatre and on film. Whether or not her new stage is destined to be a political one remains to be seen; the Commons has already coped with Glenda Jackson's transition, and many a drawn-out debate could do with being kicked into life with a few crisply delivered lines.

But those tweeting and blogging for her to become the next prime minister might take heed of what she wrote in the Observer two years ago: "I could never go into politics," she said, "because I'm far too impatient and I'd want to be a dictator, albeit a benevolent one … I would hope."

The Lumley lowdown

Born: Joanna Lumley on 1 May 1946 in Kashmir, India. Daughter of a major in the Ghurka Rifles, she went to Army schools in Hong Kong and Malaya then St Mary's in Sussex and the Lucie Clayton finishing school. Failed Rada exam at 16 and became a house model for the designer Jean Muir.

Best of times: Meeting the Dalai Lama and returning a prayer scroll her grandfather had been given by his predecessor was a life-long ambition but she says becoming a grandmother was her greatest blessing.

Worst of times: When at a press conference last week a BBC reporter suggested to Phil Woolas that it was inappropriate that "just an actress" should be dictating government, her face froze in fury at the sneering remark.

What she says: "I don't think men are that attracted by glamour. I think women are attracted by glamour. I think men are attracted by a sense of friendship."

What they say: "... It's hard to find a more enjoyable travelling companion than the clever, charming, indefatigable Ms Lumley."Archie Baron, director of her recent BBC1 film In the Land of The Northern Lights